CO2 Orgy
My daughter tells me that is the day to blog about Global warming and so I thought I would go back about 15 years to the first piece I ever wrote about global warming. Here are some excerpts.
Imagine a man living his entire live in a modest and sober manner but then upon reaching the age of fifty suddenly going on a wild and extravagant week-long orgy. And further, in the course of that binge, he contracts a terrible, incurable disease and lives out the remainder of life suffering the consequences of that disease.
This is the analogy Tim McKibben uses in his book The End of Nature to describe humankind's use of energy. For thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution our energy consumption was modest and the resulting production of carbon dioxide was also modest. But during the last two centuries we have engaged in an orgy of fossil fuel consumption, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates. Now, says McKibben, we have changed nature to such an extent that it cannot be brought back to the way it was. The earth is suffering from an incurable overdose of CO2. Yet instead of modifying our production of CO2, we continue our orgy, though we are chronically ill because of it. We are like the man dying of lung cancer who still needs his hourly fix of nicotine. Even if we significantly cut back in our production of CO2, we could not return nature to the state it was prior to the Industrial Revolution. We might, however, be able to stop or slow down the dramatic alterations in nature that are presently occurring.
So why don't we do something about it? Why do we continue to increase the amount of CO2 that we spew into the atmosphere? I'd like to try to answer those questions, but first let me give a bit of background to the concept of global warming, or the greenhouse effect, as it is sometimes called.
You have probably noticed that if you park your car in the sun, windows closed, on a hot day, it is much hotter in the car then outside the car. This is because the sun rays that enter the car return as infra-red radiation. But since glass does not allow infra-red rays to escape, the car gets very hot. The same principle operates in a greenhouse: sunlight gets into the greenhouse but the infra-red rays cannot escape. Carbon dioxide functions in the atmosphere of earth much the same as glass functions in a greenhouse or your car: it prevents infra-red rays from escaping earth's atmosphere. This is not all bad, since if we did not have that blockage occurring to some extent we might be as cold as Mars and unable to support life. But if there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere then more and more infra-red rays are contained in earth's atmosphere, and gradually the overall temperature of earth increases. (Venus, whose atmosphere is 97 percent CO2, has a temperature that is 700 degrees warmer than earth's.) Right now the mean temperature of the earth is increasing because we have increased the amount of CO2 by about 25% in the last century. Unfortunately, it does not take huge temperature changes for living conditions on earth to be radically altered.
Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has testified before a congressional hearing that only a 1 per cent chance exists that temperature increases in the last few years were accidental. In other words, a 99% chance exists that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are responsible for the warming trends in temperatures.
Dr. Hansen's conclusions are based on computer analyses of a hundred years worth of thermometer readings world wide. Therefore, even if this summer were unusually cool in the midwest but the world wide statistical data showed an increase in the mean temperature, Dr. Hansen's conclusions would stand. But still so many people deny the evidence. Why?
We call our time a scientific age and in some ways, of course, we are. But in many ways we are not. We are common sense empiricists and if we can't feel the temperature changes ourselves, we're no more likely to take science's word for it than were the medical doctors of a century ago when they were told by scientists with microscopes that there were millions of little things called germs that were causing their patients to die. It took a long time and a lot of unnecessary deaths before medical doctors finally took the word of the microbiologists for what they could not see with their naked eyes.
A second reason why we do not do anything--and this is probably the most significant reason--is that to do anything about cutting back on our production of CO2s will be percieved as harmful to the economy and our spendthrift lifestyles. Our economy depends upon an ever increasing rate of consumption of manufactured products, and since we cannot produce the products without spewing excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, we are caught. To stop excessive consumption would be to cripple the economy. Our governments, our very lives, are controlled by the economic machine, so when that machine says we must produce and consume, we do it.
Even the economist Lester Thurow, himself an advocate of global capitalism, admits this is true. In a book review in the March, 1997, The Atlantic he says:
Where both the market and the political process fail is in dealing with global environmental issues such as global warming . . . in which the effects occur over long periods of time and their severity is highly uncertain. Crises aren't clear; solutions can be postponed, and the problems allowed to fester. The decline of the quality of life is so slow that we can't notice it and therefore don't do anything about it.(100)
But Christians cannot be content with doing nothing. We are called to care for the earth. That means we work to decrease our emission of greenhouse gases. And even if we seem to make little or no headway, we keep at it.
Imagine a man living his entire live in a modest and sober manner but then upon reaching the age of fifty suddenly going on a wild and extravagant week-long orgy. And further, in the course of that binge, he contracts a terrible, incurable disease and lives out the remainder of life suffering the consequences of that disease.
This is the analogy Tim McKibben uses in his book The End of Nature to describe humankind's use of energy. For thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution our energy consumption was modest and the resulting production of carbon dioxide was also modest. But during the last two centuries we have engaged in an orgy of fossil fuel consumption, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at ever increasing rates. Now, says McKibben, we have changed nature to such an extent that it cannot be brought back to the way it was. The earth is suffering from an incurable overdose of CO2. Yet instead of modifying our production of CO2, we continue our orgy, though we are chronically ill because of it. We are like the man dying of lung cancer who still needs his hourly fix of nicotine. Even if we significantly cut back in our production of CO2, we could not return nature to the state it was prior to the Industrial Revolution. We might, however, be able to stop or slow down the dramatic alterations in nature that are presently occurring.
So why don't we do something about it? Why do we continue to increase the amount of CO2 that we spew into the atmosphere? I'd like to try to answer those questions, but first let me give a bit of background to the concept of global warming, or the greenhouse effect, as it is sometimes called.
You have probably noticed that if you park your car in the sun, windows closed, on a hot day, it is much hotter in the car then outside the car. This is because the sun rays that enter the car return as infra-red radiation. But since glass does not allow infra-red rays to escape, the car gets very hot. The same principle operates in a greenhouse: sunlight gets into the greenhouse but the infra-red rays cannot escape. Carbon dioxide functions in the atmosphere of earth much the same as glass functions in a greenhouse or your car: it prevents infra-red rays from escaping earth's atmosphere. This is not all bad, since if we did not have that blockage occurring to some extent we might be as cold as Mars and unable to support life. But if there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere then more and more infra-red rays are contained in earth's atmosphere, and gradually the overall temperature of earth increases. (Venus, whose atmosphere is 97 percent CO2, has a temperature that is 700 degrees warmer than earth's.) Right now the mean temperature of the earth is increasing because we have increased the amount of CO2 by about 25% in the last century. Unfortunately, it does not take huge temperature changes for living conditions on earth to be radically altered.
Dr. James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has testified before a congressional hearing that only a 1 per cent chance exists that temperature increases in the last few years were accidental. In other words, a 99% chance exists that CO2 and other greenhouse gasses are responsible for the warming trends in temperatures.
Dr. Hansen's conclusions are based on computer analyses of a hundred years worth of thermometer readings world wide. Therefore, even if this summer were unusually cool in the midwest but the world wide statistical data showed an increase in the mean temperature, Dr. Hansen's conclusions would stand. But still so many people deny the evidence. Why?
We call our time a scientific age and in some ways, of course, we are. But in many ways we are not. We are common sense empiricists and if we can't feel the temperature changes ourselves, we're no more likely to take science's word for it than were the medical doctors of a century ago when they were told by scientists with microscopes that there were millions of little things called germs that were causing their patients to die. It took a long time and a lot of unnecessary deaths before medical doctors finally took the word of the microbiologists for what they could not see with their naked eyes.
A second reason why we do not do anything--and this is probably the most significant reason--is that to do anything about cutting back on our production of CO2s will be percieved as harmful to the economy and our spendthrift lifestyles. Our economy depends upon an ever increasing rate of consumption of manufactured products, and since we cannot produce the products without spewing excessive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, we are caught. To stop excessive consumption would be to cripple the economy. Our governments, our very lives, are controlled by the economic machine, so when that machine says we must produce and consume, we do it.
Even the economist Lester Thurow, himself an advocate of global capitalism, admits this is true. In a book review in the March, 1997, The Atlantic he says:
Where both the market and the political process fail is in dealing with global environmental issues such as global warming . . . in which the effects occur over long periods of time and their severity is highly uncertain. Crises aren't clear; solutions can be postponed, and the problems allowed to fester. The decline of the quality of life is so slow that we can't notice it and therefore don't do anything about it.(100)
But Christians cannot be content with doing nothing. We are called to care for the earth. That means we work to decrease our emission of greenhouse gases. And even if we seem to make little or no headway, we keep at it.
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